'It's a pain in the ass, is what it is,' said Graham. 'A very difficult, unattractive restoration.'
'I believe in the old days, they were required to pass your dental license exam,' I said.
'That's right.' Graham continued to work. 'The students hated them.'
He went on to explain that gold foil restorations required the dentist to pound gold pellets into a tooth, and the slightest bit of moisture would cause the filling to fall out. Although the restorations were very good, they were labor intensive, painful and expensive.
'And not many patients,' he added, 'want gold showing, especially on the facial surface of their front teeth.'
He continued charting various repairs, extractions, shapes and misshapes that made this woman who she was. She had a slightly open bite and a semicircular wear pattern to her front teeth possibly consistent with her biting down on a pipe, since it was reported to him that she had been seen with a pipe.
'If she was a chronic pipe smoker, wouldn't you expect her teeth to be stained from tobacco?' I said, for I saw no evidence of it.
'Possibly. But look at how eroded her tooth surfaces are — these scooped-out areas at the gum line that required the gold foil.' He showed us. 'The major damage to her teeth is consistent with obsessive overbrushing.'
'So if she brushed the hell out of her teeth ten times a day, she's not going to have tobacco stains,' Marino said.
'Brushing the hell out of her teeth doesn't fit with her poor hygiene,' I commented. 'In fact, her mouth seems inconsistent with everything else about her.'
'Can you tell when she had this work done?' Rader asked.
'Not really,' Graham said as he continued probing. 'But it is consistently good. I'd say it was probably the same dentist who did all of it, and about the only area in the country where you find gold foil restorations still being done is the West Coast.'
'I'm wondering how you can know that,' Detective O'Donnell said to him.
'You can only get these restorations done where there are dentists who still do them. I don't do them. I personally don't know anybody who does them. But there is an organization called the American Academy of Gold Foil Operators that has several hundred members — dentists who pride themselves on still doing this particular restoration. And the largest concentration of them is in Washington State.'
'Why would someone want a restoration like this?' O'Donnell then asked.
'Gold lasts a long time.' Graham glanced up at him. 'There are people who are nervous about what is put into their mouths. The chemicals in composite white fillings supposedly can cause nerve damage. They stain and wear out more quickly. Some people believe silver causes everything from cystic fibrosis to hair loss.'
Then Marino spoke. 'Yo, well, some squirrels just like the way gold looks.'
'Some do,' Graham agreed. 'She might be one of those.'
But I did not think so. This woman did not strike me as one who cared about her appearance.
I suspected she had not shaved her head to make a statement or because she thought it looked trendy. As we began to explore her internally, I understood more, even as the mystery of her deepened.
She had undergone a hysterectomy that had removed her uterus vaginally and left her ovaries, and her feet were flat. She also had an old intracerebral hematoma in the frontal lobe of her brain from a coup injury that had fractured her skull beneath the scars we had found.
'She was the victim of an assault, possibly many years ago,' I said. 'And it's the sort of head injury you associate with personality change.' I thought of her wandering the world and of no one missing her. 'She probably was estranged from her family and had a seizure disorder.'
Horowitz turned to Rader. 'See if we can put a rush on tox. Let's check her for diphenylhydantoin.'
5
Little could be done the rest of the day. The city's mind was on Christmas, and laboratories and most offices were closed. Marino and I walked several blocks toward Central Park before stopping at a Greek coffee shop, where I drank coffee because I could not eat. Then we found a cab.
Wesley was not in his room. I returned to mine and for a long time stood before the window looking out at dark, tangled trees and black rocks amid snowy expanses of the park. The sky was gray and heavy. I could not see the ice-skating rink, nor the fountain where the murdered woman was found. Though I had not been on the scene when her body was, I had studied the photographs. What Gault had done was horrible, and I wondered where he was right now.
I could not count the violent deaths I had worked since my career began, yet I understood many of them better than I let on from the witness stand. It is not difficult to comprehend people being so enraged, drugged, frightened or crazy that they kill.